


Bring out your dead

by Eledhwen



Series: Hal's Histories [3]
Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Flashbacks, Gen, Historical, Plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:33:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eledhwen/pseuds/Eledhwen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 1665, and the Black Death has hit London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring out your dead

“What a day!” Tom collapsed into the sofa. “That hen party … must've had a bit too much to drink last night. The state of their room ...” 

Alex looked up from her magazine. “Messy?”

Tom shuddered. “Worse.”

Coming through from the kitchen, Hal handed Tom a cup of tea. “I've said it before, Tom, this is nothing in the scale of hideous jobs.”

Tom took the tea. “Ta. Go on then, what's the worst thing you ever did?”

Hal sat down, and thought for a while. 

“The Great Plague,” he said. “London. 1665.”

* * *

They began dying in the winter, on the outskirts of London, and few in the City paid much attention – least of all Hal Yorke. Persuaded away from blood and killing, for a time, he had holed up in a backstreet near Newgate Gaol, and was existing miserably, avoiding other vampires and trying to get drunk on cheap liquor. 

But even Hal could not have failed to notice when the pestilence entered the City. As houses were closed up and the rich began leaving, the bustling, stinking streets became quiet with the hush of death. The silence was broken only with the wails of women and the cries of ailing children, and, as night fell, the sound of wheels over cobbles as the death-carts collected the corpses of those who had died. 

For Hal, oddly, the quiet was a relief. With fewer people on the streets his temptation was lessened, and his appetite was not whetted by the all-pervasive stench of death. 

A month or so into the outbreak the criers began calling for help to dig graves. With the taverns closed, Hal found himself volunteering. For a penny a day, a cloth tied around his face, he toiled in the mud, digging and digging, while the carts clattered up with corpses. The bodies were tipped into the holes, and Hal and his fellows covered them up and dug more graves. 

The stench threatened to overwhelm them, and though Hal had seen many horrors – indeed, had created many horrors – still the sight of the boils and pustules on the corpses, the rats scurrying amid them and the flies buzzing around the gravepits turned his stomach. And the labour was back-breaking, or would have been, had he been human. Even so, his fingers and nails were black with the dirt and his clothes torn and stained. 

At the end of each day they were paid, and each morning, he would return to pick up his shovel once more. The workers with him sometimes returned and sometimes did not. Now and then, Hal would recognise a face as he tipped dirt over it, look into dead eyes and try and remember the name of the man they once belonged to. Only he kept returning, the dull tedium of the work numbing his hunger. 

He was skin and bones, but still strong compared to his human fellows, when the number of bodies began to diminish. One week they buried fifty a day, the next thirty, and finally came a day when only one cart came carrying a solitary corpse.

“Plague's over,” said the cart driver, wiping a brow. “Quacks say we're safe.”

“We should have an ale, if the taverns are open again,” said the man working alongside Hal. 

Hal tried to leave, but he was towed along by the cart driver and his companion and given a bowl of unsavoury stew and a tankard of stale ale. The tavern was busy, with the poor folk who had stayed and survived despite the odds; its air fetid with unwashed bodies and thick with the pulse of the blood.

He drank the ale and ate the stew and fled, determined not to give in, not now. On the way back to his room he caught a scrawny cat and drained it dry, and spent the night in shivers and the next week huddled on his bed, feverish and delirious. 

The hunger called him out, eventually, as he had always known it would. In a tavern he sat in a corner, eyeing up the customers. Some had clearly suffered from the plague, others, stronger, had been lucky. He watched, and waited, and after some time followed a drunk sailor out into the alleyway.

Hal moved out of the rooms in Newgate a week later.

* * *

“That's a pretty crappy ending for a pretty crappy story,” said Alex, picking up her magazine again.

Hal picked up the empty tea mugs, and caught Tom's eye.

“Glad they got rid of that plague,” Tom said. “Strikes me it drove a lot of people a bit daft.”

Giving him a grateful smile, Hal nodded. “It did.”

He went to wash up.


End file.
